Anyone else think this is a huge non-story? Like, of course there's going to be oxygen in distant galaxies. Why wouldn't there be? It would be far more interesting if there wasn't oxygen in distant galaxies.
>Galaxies usually start their lives full of young stars, which are made mostly of light elements like hydrogen and helium. As stars evolve, they create heavier elements like oxygen, which get dispersed through their host galaxy after they die. Researchers had thought that, at 300 million years old, the Universe was still too young to have galaxies ripe with heavy elements. However, the two ALMA studies indicate JADES-GS-z14-0 has about 10 times more heavy elements than expected.
I didn't know this so I also wasn't surprised by the headline. Although it seems from this quote that they also did expect oxygen to be there, just not as much as they determined to be there. Although I have almost zero interest in space so perhaps this is bigger than I understand. I only clicked on the article because oxygen seems like a pretty simple compound to me and was surprised by the headline. I also think the headline is somewhat misleading due to the point above and how distant the galaxy is isn't the actual the newsworthy point as you say. It is only relevant to the extent that light from distant galaxies reaches earth slower.
The real headline should be something like "more oxygen than expected is created in young galaxies" which is indeed one of those space articles I would never click on.
Or we have fundamental errors in measuring distances and ages of things which is leading to these unexpected observations.
The expectation is indeed that all galaxies will have more or less the exact same elements that we have at ~13 billion years of age. But the image here is from a galaxy that was, at the time the image was emitted towards us, much younger than that.
To put this in persepctive, our Sun, which is larger than the median star, produces no oxygen and is ~4.5 billion years old.
Larger stars are theorized to undergo the so-called CNO cycle [1]. To get to this process after "only" 300 million years means the star or stars are truly massive.
Because the light we're seeing from this galaxy is from only 300 million years after the big bang. Elements like oxygen primarily form in supernovae, and the abundance of oxygen and other heavy elements in this extremely young galaxy is ten times higher than expected.
"The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected."
Just a few molecules per cubic meter or less. Estimated at ten trillion times the entire volume of water on earth. Seemed like a lot at the time.
So that was early oxygen. But atypical.
Even the obvious things have to be proven or we would never really know.
Instead of inventing something interesting like "we're able to scan the elemental composition of every galaxy within a radius within seconds" i.e. solve the problem rather than create useless papers and PR.
And yes, they all mostly need to fish for funding to keep their not-so-well paid jobs going.
They are hardly "ordained priests" though. I think you are trying to insult them, but not really sure what you even mean. They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent people who could earn a lot more by working for FAANG or hedge funds, but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance they get to discover something interesting about the universe we live in. So not much like priests then.
Having interviewed many failed priests of higher education, this is not true. It might have been true 50 years ago, but if you are smart and intelligent you typically do not spend 5-7 of the most productive years of your life getting a PhD.
>but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance they get to discover something interesting about the universe we live in. So not much like priests then.
This is exactly what priests do for religion right? Academics are ordained priests educated in the Seminary of Higher Education. You need to be granted a Doctor of Philosophy in order to join the Church of Higher Education, and then maybe a few decades of cloistered contemplation and publishing of prayers to the funding agencies will let you do something useful.
If you want to spend your life in the pursuit of knowledge rather than mere money or status, it's kind of a prerequisite to demonstrate you can perform original research.
I honestly don't get the analogy with priests. They still seem utterly different to me.
The analog is with forcing promising researchers to go through 5-10 years of thankless "training" to be granted a doctorate, so that they can be taken "seriously" by granting institutions, and have them fight among themselves so they can get resources and rise up the ranks of academia.
It's the same institutional structure, not anything to do with the content, and this is by design since academia and the Church were one and the same centuries ago!
Of course the idea that you don't need institutional approval to do something is alien to someone steeped in this worldview, but this is the news site for YC, most famous for telling people no, in fact you don't have to waste a decade working before doing something interesting.
I disagree strongly with describing learning what we currently know (or think we know) as reading sacred texts and being annointed as the only ones allowed to perform scientific research.
Scientific texts are very much not sacred. Yes, there are orthodoxies which most people believe, and if you are going to go against them, you better have damn good evidence. But you absolutely can challenge them, which is how science progresses and is the key difference between religion and science.
Since I just had a paper published in a computer science academic journal last year, (and I'm very much not an academic), I also challenge the idea that only people within the "priesthood" are allowed to practice the discipline. Obviously this will be rarer than people whose day job is doing this, but there is no license to practice science required from an anointed priesthood.
So forgive me if I really push back on that analogy, as it obscures the absolutely critical differences between them.
Obviously the commercial sector won't typically fund things unless there is some probable payback, so they are not so good at doing fundamental research.
You need both to get the best returns.
Furthermore, academia doesn't do research unless there's a payback either in papers or prestige. What academia are you thinking of that allows for the pure pursuit of whatever's interesting?
Academia will do non commercial research though, because they are motivated by prestige, not money.
I think we are violently agreeing!